Sunday, January 30, 2011

Saturday, January 29, 2011

For my exhibition "Amerigo", I will be exhibiting one large painting and a group of works on paper. These works were spurred by contemplation of the European exploration and invasion of what came to be called America and the man this 'New World' was named after, Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci was a curious character who happened to be in just the right place at just the right time to receive the honor of his name being eternally glorified in the naming of two continents. One could say he deserved the honor principally as a master self-promoter and clever huckster, whose inflated claims for his skills of navigation and tall tales of voyages at sea served to attract royal money to fund his explorations. Besides offering a compelling metaphor for the manner in which artists posture to fund their own explorations, there is obviously much to consider in terms of that moment in history when Native American cultures fell to disease and plunder by European invaders and how much, or how little, has really changed since then. The window into history may often be foggy and obfuscating, but certain traits of our forebears carry forth clear as day. The slick salesmanship behind the corporate machine finds no border that can't be traversed, no population that can't be effectively colonized. Amerigo Vespucci embodies this thirst for continual expansion.

Christopher Pate (born 1965 St. Louis, Missouri, raised in Boise, Idaho) has lived and worked in Los Angeles for over 25 years. He has spent this time investigating the role of painting and drawing in contemporary society, which led to a sequence of particular projects. In recent years, the work has coalesced into an amalgam of abstraction, representation, collage and pop imagery, forming principally abstract meditations on history and the imperfection of memory.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

“Gravity is Always Attractive” premieres Herzog's most recent work,“Our Picture of the Universe,” combining cosmetology and cosmology ina shared vision of universe and title. Stephen Hawking's "A BriefHistory of Time" is the foremost populist scientific text attemptingto democratize hermetic theories using pictures and words in lieu ofequations. ﻿Hawking's book begins with a chapter titled "Our Pictureof the Universe," which is read by Ximena Navarrete, Miss Universe2010, in the audio recording playing in the gallery. Navarrete wasborn in Guadalajara in 1988, the same year Stephen Hawking's "A BriefHistory of Time" was first published.

Katie Herzog is an artist and librarian living in Los Angeles. Recentsolo exhibitions include "Informel" at Actual Size, "ArchitectureSchool Dropout" at the Southern California Institute of Architecturecafe, and "Ecstasy of Municipality" at Whittier City Hall.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence -Althusser

This work is heavily influenced by my recent exhaustive investigation into visceral realism, a short-lived Latin American conceptual art movement active in Argentina during the economic crisis in the 1990's. The visceral realists were engaged in creating new forms of institutional critique, and organized their own radical version of "happenings" that took the form of small riots in commercial galleries, museum takeovers, and abductions of curators. I continue to be drawn to their body of work for the manner in which it exemplifies the intersection between crisis, catastrophe, and creativity. The work in this show, which I consider to be a single installation, investigates the visual politics of violent spectacle and protest, and the close relationship between political extremism and the concept of a "suspension of disbelief" in literary theory.